Hacking an RC Car

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As a test, I decided to hack an existing piece of consumer electronic and control it with an Arduino. I took apart my son’s $10 toy RC car and used a wire to contact the battery’s positive terminal to random points on the circuit board until I isolated which circuits control the steering and motor. Once I located these circuits, I soldered wires to these points and connected them to pins on an Arduino.

My Arduino happens to be connected to a PS2 shield, so I made some slight modifications to my PS2 controller sketch to digitalWrite the appropriate pins to HIGH. Here’s the sketch: